by James Jones
E-for-Easy’s attack was likewise a failure. The lead platoon, moving out onto the broader, but flatter area of The Elephant’s Forelegs, had been caught in a withering crossfire from the jungle on its right and left. Easy’s commander, trying to send up an attached machinegun platoon from H, had them almost annihilated. And after that the rest of the company did not try to move and remained just a few yards in front of the crest of Hill 209.
That was the story. By three-thirty all those who were able had returned. Medical parties, at considerable risk, were searching out the others. There was no dictated bulletin that night by the regimental commander. Casualties for the day were 34 killed and 102 wounded. Speculations as to why, with this holocaust, today’s casualties were only slightly higher than yesterday’s, were left without any answer. The only reasonable thing to say was that yesterday there had been more hours of actual fighting. But more important than all of this news was the news that the regimental commander had ordered the exhausted 2d Battalion back to Hills 207 and 208 into regimental reserve. This meant that tomorrow 1st Battalion would take over the attack. The battalion from the division’s reserve regiment on their left would then, undoubtedly, take over their lines on Hill 209.
This was exactly what happened, and their orders reached them soon enough. There had existed a remote possibility that the regimental commander might order the battalion of the division reserve to make the attack, and C-for-Charlie clung to this hopefully, but nobody really believed it. Their orders, which reached them around six o’clock, confirmed their wisdom.
Colonel Tall’s plan was not radically different from the 2d Battalion’s colonel. Two companies would attack abreast; C-for-Charlie would be on the left and would capture The Elephant’s Head, Hill 210, and A-for-Able on the right would move into The Elephant’s Forelegs, Hill 214, and hook up there with the 3d Battalion who were encountering less resistance. Baker would be in reserve behind Charlie. The plan was really no different from today’s. The only difference was that tomorrow there would be water and whatever casualties 2d Battalion may have inflicted today, if any.
C-for-Charlie had drawn the worst assignment: the Bowling Alley. They believed the drawing of the worst assignment to be their perpetual destiny. And that evening when a company of the divisional reserve battalion moved in to take over their slit trenches so that they might rest up for tomorrow, C-for-Charlie received them without friendship. They came smiling and talking, filled with flattering hero worship and eager to please, because they believed C-for-Charlie to be veterans and themselves green; and C-for-Charlie treated them to the same morose silences which yesterday morning they themselves had received from E-for-Easy going up to attack.
But some time before any of this had happened, young Pfc Bead had killed his first Japanese, the first Japanese to be killed by his company, or for that matter by his battalion.
It was, Bead reflected about it later, when indeed he was able to think about it at all, which was not for some time, typical of his entire life; of his stupid incompetence, his foolish idiocy, his gross mismanagement of everything he put his hands on; so that whatever he did, done so badly and in such ugly style, gave no satisfaction: action without honor, travail without grace. A man of a different temperament might have found it funny; Bead could not laugh.
At just about five o’clock he had had to take a crap. And he had not had a crap for two days. Everything had quieted down on the line by five and at the aid station below them the last of the wounded were being cared for and sent back. Bead had seen other men taking craps along the slope, and he knew the procedure. After two days on these slopes the procedure was practically standardized. Because every available bit of level space was occupied, jammed with men and equipment, crapping was relegated to the steeper slopes. Here the process was to take along an entrenching shovel and dig a little hole, then turn your backside to the winds of the open air and squat, balancing yourself precariously on your toes, supporting yourself on the dirt or rocks in front of you with your hands. The effect, because of the men below in the basin, was rather like hanging your ass out of a tenth floor window above a crowded street. It was an embarrassing position to say the least, and the men below were not above taking advantage of it with catcalls, whistles or loud soulful sighs.
Bead was shy. He could have done it that way if he’d had to, but because he was shy, and because now everything had quieted down to an unbelievable evening peace after the terror, noise and danger of the afternoon, he decided to have himself a pleasant, quiet, private crap in keeping with the peacefulness. Without saying anything to anyone he dropped all of his equipment by his hole and taking only his GI roll of toilet paper, he started to climb the twenty yards to the crest. He did not even take an entrenching tool because on the other side there was no need to bury his stool.
Beyond the crest he knew that the slope did not drop precipitously as it did further to the left, but fell slowly for perhaps fifty yards through the trees before it plunged in a bluff straight down to the river. This was where D Company had caught the Japanese patrol earlier in the day.
“Hey, bud, where you going?” somebody from the 2d Platoon called to him as he passed through.
“To take a shit,” Bead called back without looking around and disappeared over the crest.
The trees began three yards below the actual crest. Because the jungle was thinner with less undergrowth here at its outer edge, it looked more like the columnar, smooth-floored woods of home and made Bead think of when he was a boy. Reminded of times when as a Boy Scout he had camped out and crapped with peaceful pleasure in the summer woods of Iowa, he placed the roll of paper comfortably near, dropped his pants and squatted. Half way through with relieving himself, he looked up and saw a Japanese man with a bayoneted rifle moving stealthily through the trees ten yards away.
As if feeling his gaze, the Japanese man turned his head and saw him in almost the same instant but not before, through the electrifying, heart stabbing thrill of apprehension, danger, disbelief, denial, Bead got a clear, burned in the brain impression of him.
He was a small man, and thin; very thin. His mud-slicked, mustard-khaki uniform with its ridiculous wrap leggins hung from him in jungledamp, greasy folds. Not only did he not wear any of the elaborate camouflage Bead had been taught by movies to expect, he did not even wear a helmet. He wore a greasy, wrinkled, bent up forage cap. Beneath it his yellowbrown face was so thin the high cheekbones seemed about to come out through his skin. He was badly unshaven, perhaps two weeks, but his greasy looking beard was as straggly as Bead’s nineteen-year-old one. As to age, Bead could not form any clear impression; he might have been twenty, or forty.
All of this visual perception occurred in an eyewink of time, an eyewink which seemed to coast on and on and on, then the Japanese man saw him too and turning, all in one movement, began to run at him, but moving cautiously, the bayonet on the end of his rifle extended.
Bead, still squatting with his pants down, his behind still dirty, gathered his weight under him. He was going to have to try to jump one way or another, but which? Which side to jump to? Am I going to die? Am I really going to die now? He did not even have his knife with him. Terror and disbelief, denial, fought each other in him. Why the Japanese did not simply fire the rifle he did not know. Perhaps he was afraid of being heard in the American lines. Instead he came on, obviously meaning to bayonet Bead where he sat. His eyes were intent with purpose. His lips were drawn back from his teeth, which were large, but were well formed and not at all protruding as in the posters. Was it really true?
In desperation, still not knowing which way to try to jump, all in one movement Bead pulled up his pants over his dirty behind to free his legs and dove forward in a low, shoestring football tackle when the Japanese man was almost to him, taking him around the ankles, his feet driving hard in the soft ground. Surprised, the Japanese man brought the rifle down sharply, but Bead was already in under the bayonet. The stacking swivel banged him painful
ly on the collarbone. By clasping the mudcaked shins against his chest and using his head for a fulcrum, still driving hard with his feet, the Japanese man had no way to fall except backward, and Bead was already clawing up his length before he hit the ground. In the fall he dropped the rifle and had the wind knocked out of him. This gave Bead time to hitch up his pants again and spring upward once more until, kneeling on his upper arms and sitting back on his chest, he began to punch and claw him in the face and neck. The Japanese man could only pluck feebly at his legs and forearms.
Bead heard a high, keening scream and thought it was the Japanese begging for mercy until finally he slowly became aware that the Japanese man was now unconscious. Then he realized it was himself making that animal scream. He could not, however, stop it. The Japanese man’s face was now running blood from the clawing, and several of his teeth had been broken back into his throat from the punches. But Bead could not stop. Sobbing and wailing, he continued to belabor the unconscious Japanese with fingernail and fist. He wanted to tear his face off with his bare hands, but found this difficult. Then he seized his throat and tried to break his head by beating it on the soft ground but only succeeded in digging a small hole with it. Exhausted finally, he collapsed forward on hands and knees above the bleeding, unconscious man, only to feel the Japanese immediately twitch with life beneath him.
Outraged at such a display of vitality, alternately sobbing and wailing, Bead rolled aside, seized the enemy rifle and on his knees raised it above his head and drove the long bayonet almost full length into the Japanese chest. The Japanese man’s body convulsed in a single spasm. His eyes opened, staring horribly at nothing, and his hands flipped up from the elbows and seized the blade through his chest.
Staring with horror at the fingers which were cutting themselves on the blade trying to draw it out, Bead leaped to his feet and his pants fell down. Hiking his pants up and standing spraddlelegged to keep them from falling, he seized the rifle and tried to pull it out in order to plunge it in again. But the bayonet would not come loose. Remembering dimly something he had been taught in bayonet practice, he grabbed the small of the stock and pulled the trigger. Nothing happened. The gun was on safety. Fumbling with the unfamiliar, foreign safety, he released it and pulled again. There was a flesh-muffled explosion and the bayonet came free. But the fool of a Japanese with his open eyes went on grasping at his chest with his bleeding fingers as if he could not get it through his thick head that the bayonet was out. My god, how much killing did the damned fool require? Bead had beaten him, kicked him, choked him, clawed him, bayoneted him, shot him. He had a sudden frantic vision of himself, by rights the victor, doomed forever to kill perpetually the same single Japanese.
This time, not intending to be caught in the same trap twice, instead of sticking him he reversed the rifle in his hands and drove the butt down full force into his face, smashing it. Standing above him spraddlelegged to keep his pants up, he drove the rifle butt again and again into the Japanese man’s face, until all of the face and most of the head were mingled with the muddy ground. Then he threw the rifle from him and fell down on his hands and knees and began to vomit.
Bead did not lose consciousness, but he completely lost his sense of time. When he came to himself, still on hands and knees, gasping, he shook his hanging head and opened his eyes and discovered his left hand was resting in a friendly way on the Japanese man’s still, mustard-khaki knee. Bead snatched it away as though he had discovered it lying across a burning stove. He had an obscure feeling that if he did not look at the corpse of the man he had killed or touch it, he would not be held responsible. With this in mind he crawled feebly away through the trees, breathing in long painful groans.
The woods were very quiet. Bead could not remember ever having heard such quiet. Then faintly, penetrating the immensity of this quiet, he heard voices, American voices, and the casual sound of a shovel scraped against a rock. It seemed impossible that they could be that close. He got shakily to his feet holding up his pants. It also seemed impossible that anything could ever again sound as casual as that shovel had. He knew he had to get back inside the lines. But first he would have to try to clean himself up. He was a mess. He had no desire to finish his crap.
First of all, he had to go back to the vicinity of the dead man to get his roll of toilet paper. He hated that but there wasn’t any choice. His pants and his dirty behind were what bothered him most. Horror of that was inbred in him; but also he was terrified someone might think he had crapped his pants from fear. He used most of his roll of toilet paper on that, and in the end even sacrificed one of his three clean handkerchiefs which he was saving back for his glasses, moistening it with spittle. In addition he was spattered with blood and vomit. He could not remove every stain, but he tried to get enough so that nobody would notice. Because he had already decided he was not going to mention this to anybody.
Also, he had lost his glasses. He found them, miraculously unbroken, beside the dead man. Searching for his glasses, he had to go right up to the body, and to look at it closely. The faceless—almost headless—corpse with its bloody, cut fingers and the mangled hole in its chest, so short a time ago a living, breathing man, made him so dizzy in the stomach that he thought he might faint. On the other hand, he could not forget the intent look of deliberate purpose on the man’s face as he came in with the bayonet. There didn’t seem to be any reasonable answer.
The feet were the saddest thing. In their hobnailed infantry boots they splayed outward, relaxed, like the feet of a man asleep. With a kind of perverse fascination Bead could not resist giving one of them a little kick. It lolloped up, then flopped back. Bead wanted to turn and run. He could not escape a feeling that, especially now, after he’d both looked and touched, some agent of retribution would try to hold him responsible. He wanted to beg the man’s forgiveness in the hope of forestalling responsibility. He had not felt such oppressive guilt over anything since the last time his mother had caught and whipped him for masturbating.
If he’d had to kill him, and apparently he had, at least he could have done it more efficiently and gracefully, and with less pain and anguish for the poor man. If he had not lost his head, had not gone crazy with fear, perhaps he might even have taken him prisoner and obtained valuable information from him. But he had been frantic to get the killing over with, as if afraid that as long as the man could breathe he might suddenly stand up and accuse him. Suddenly Bead had a mental picture of them both with positions reversed: of himself lying there and feeling that blade plunge through his chest; of himself watching that riflebutt descend upon his face, with the final fire-exploding end. It made him so weak that he had to sit down. What if the other man had got the bayonet down quicker? What if he himself had tackled a little higher? Instead of merely a bruise on his collarbone, Bead saw himself spitted through the soft of the shoulder, head on, that crude blade descending into the soft dark of his chest cavity. He could not believe it.
Settling his glasses on his face, taking a couple of deep breaths and a last look at his ruined enemy, he got up and started clumping up out of the trees toward the crest. Bead was ashamed and embarrassed by the whole thing, that was the truth, and that was why he didn’t want to mention it to anybody.
He got back through the line all right, without questions. “Have a good shit?” the man from the 2d Platoon called to him. “Yeah,” he mumbled and clomped on, down the slope toward the CP. But on his way he was joined by Pfc Doll, on his way down from 1st Platoon with a message to ask again about water. Doll fell in step with him, and immediately noticed his damaged hands and the blood spatters.
“Christ! What happened to your knuckles? You have a fight with somebody?”
Bead’s heart sank. It would have to be Doll. “No. I slipped and fell and skinned myself,” he said. He was as stiff and sore all over as if he had had a fistfight with somebody. Horror welled in him again, suddenly, ballooningly. He took several very deep breaths into a sore rib cage.
Doll grinned with frank but amiable skepticism. “And I spose all them little blood splatters come from your knuckles?”
“Leave me alone, Doll!” Bead blazed up. “I don’t feel like talking! So just leave me alone, hunh? Will you?” He tried to put into his eyes all the fierce toughness of a man just returned from killing an enemy. He hoped maybe that would shut him up, and it did. At least for a while. They walked on down in silence, Bead aware with a kind of horrified disgust that already he was fitting the killing of the Japanese man into the playing of a role; a role without anything, no reality, of himself or anything else. It hadn’t been like that at all.
Doll did not stay shut up, though. Doll had been a little taken aback by Bead’s vehemence, a forcefulness he was not used to expecting from Bead. He could smell something when he saw it. And after he had delivered his message, receiving the answer he expected which was that Stein was doing everything he could to get them water, he brought it up again, this time by calling it to the attention of Welsh. Welsh and Storm were sitting on the sides of their holes matching pennies for cigarettes, which were already beginning to be precious. They would match four best out of seven, to lengthen the game and cut down the expense in cigarettes, then both pull out their plastic pack holders which everyone had bought to keep their butts dry and carefully pass the one tube between them. Doll went over to them grinning with his eyebrow raised. He did not feel, at least not at the time, that what he was doing had anything to do with ratting on someone or stooling.
